Few if any of us can imagine what the deaths of millions is “really” like, but we can imagine one death, and this gives the lone death it's feeling of immediate tragedy, a feeling that is missing from...Few if any of us can imagine what the deaths of millions is “really” like, but we can imagine one death, and this gives the lone death it's feeling of immediate tragedy, a feeling that is missing from Ellman’s cold statistical description. (I recently saw someone spouting off on TikTok with a similar quote regarding COVID-19 that went something like "COVID has killed 6,540,487 people, but when compared to the world population of 7.98 billion, that number is statistically very small."
The clear intent of his statement is that the death of an individual touches us personally and its force cannot be denied, but that the deaths of a multitude are incomprehensible, and as a consequence...The clear intent of his statement is that the death of an individual touches us personally and its force cannot be denied, but that the deaths of a multitude are incomprehensible, and as a consequence mere statistics, more easily ignored. Thus it is no small thing to say that the first task of the statistician and the scientist is to summarise the data, to find some collection of numbers that can convey to an audience a sense of what has happened.
